1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates generally to publishing electronic documents. More specifically, one or more embodiments of the present disclosure relate to systems and methods that publish electronic documents utilizing navigation information.
2. Background and Relevant Art
Recent years have seen a rapid increase in the prevalence of digital devices. Indeed, in addition to more traditional personal computers, individuals now commonly have access to laptops, tablets, smart phones, smart watches, smart televisions, personal digital assistants, and other computing devices. Due to the ubiquitous nature of such devices, individuals are increasingly incorporating digital devices into daily tasks and activities. For example, it is not uncommon for individuals to utilize computing devices to facilitate communication, entertainment, employment, exercise, education, shopping, and other daily activities.
As a natural result of the growing prevalence of computing devices, individuals increasingly rely on such devices for reading, reviewing, browsing, and consuming written materials. For example, individuals now commonly utilize digital devices to read books, magazines, articles, and other documents. To meet this growing demand, a number of conventional digital publication systems have arisen that provide electronic documents to individuals through their computing devices, including newspapers, magazines, books, journals or other written collections.
A digital reading environment provides unique advantages and challenges to users. For example, users can navigate through a digital document (or collection of documents) differently than a user may peruse more traditional print media. In particular, in some applications users can navigate among a collection of articles by scrolling directly from one article to another. Similarly, a user may navigate from one page in an electronic document to another page through electronic links. Thus, the “next page” in a digital document may be any number of pages that a user can reach through any number of routes, providing uniquely flexible and precise methods for moving from page to page.
Although digital documents provide users with more convenient means of navigating one or more electronic documents, users often experience frustration when seeking to browse to a page within an electronic document that is not yet loaded (or otherwise ready for display). For example, while waiting for a page to load, conventional digital systems may provide a blank white page (or some other place-holder), remain frozen on a previous page, or otherwise indicate that the system is busy until the system has prepared the page for display to the user. Individuals want the capability to browse to pages within an electronic document without having to wait for the system to prepare a desired page.
One possible solution to this problem is to load all pages of an electronic document upfront so that a user can browse to any page at any time. Such an approach, however, introduces its own problems. Conventional digital publication systems are constrained by the capabilities of the client device displaying the electronic document to the user. Computing devices cannot instantaneously process stored data files representative of an electronic document (or a compilation of multiple documents) to provide representative images to a display screen. Accordingly, loading all pages of an electronic document can take a significant amount of time, particularly for electronic documents containing a significant number of pages or high-quality images. Waiting for a digital system to load all of the pages of an electronic document can be an even greater nuisance to a user than waiting for a single page to load. Furthermore, for large electronic documents (or compilations of multiple electronic documents), computing devices may not have sufficient memory capabilities to load all pages of an electronic document for immediate retrieval.
Some conventional digital publication systems load pages in a pre-determined order and allow a user to browse an electronic document while the system loads pages. For example, some conventional systems load pages in the order they appear within the electronic document (i.e., start at the beginning and move toward the end). Other conventional systems start loading a current page requested by a user and simply load pages in the order they appear after the current requested page (i.e., start at the current page and move toward the end). These conventional systems often result in a user browsing to a location within the electronic document that has not yet been loaded, thus forcing the user to wait while the page loads. Moreover, these conventional systems often load too many pages, thus over-taxing the capabilities of the computing device and slowing the user's ability to browse. These problems and concerns only multiply where a user seeks to browse an electronic document comprising multiple different articles containing multiple pages with high-quality images.